Finding & Collecting Cottonwood Bark, Part 2

When I go “scout­ing” for good col­lect­ing areas, there are two means of trans­porta­tion that I use for this activ­i­ty. Most often I do my scout­ing from my Chevy Blaz­er as I dri­ve the roads or high­ways – I do not dri­ve any­where with­out keep­ing my eye out for poten­tial col­lect­ing sites. It is always a good idea to take some extra time on a trip to dri­ve off the beat­en path to scout for bark. For exam­ple, get off the free­way and dri­ve some local access road sec­tions. Also take some trips using sec­ondary or state high­ways or roads even though it might be quite a bit far­ther and take much longer – get­ting there can be half the fun and very reward­ing. If a carv­er plan­ning a vaca­tion that gets them into Mon­tana, Wyoming, North Dako­ta, and some oth­er states in this gen­er­al area would be wise to add a day or so to his or her trip to allow time to do some scout­ing for bark off the inter­state high­ways.

To get anoth­er, and clos­er, view of the woods along the Yel­low­stone Riv­er, or oth­er rivers, I like to use my canoe to float 3 to 9 mile stretch­es at a time. This is always great fun as it allows me to explore the banks and islands, fish, and col­lect drift­wood and rocks as I desire. If I find a large dead tree or oth­er good source of bark, I try to locate some land­marks that will allow me to find that par­tic­u­lar area to col­lect from my Blaz­er. I usu­al­ly do take a few select pieces of the bark in the canoe as an incen­tive to get me to hunt down the landown­er and seek access to the loca­tion. I also let my friend and peo­ple I meet know that I col­lect large, thick bark for carv­ing, and ask that they let me know if they ever learn of a place where I might col­lect. This has paid off a num­ber of times.

The Tell-tail Signs

There are sev­er­al tell-tale signs that might sug­gest an are be more close­ly explored for poten­tial bark carv­ing. The deter­mined col­lec­tor should be on the look out for the fol­low­ing clues:

Bones

“Bones” are what I call dead trees from which all or most of the bark has fall­en off, which results a tree, whether stand­ing or fall­en, that stands out from the rest because it is bare and white, like a bleached bone. “Bones” are the first thing I look for, because regard­less of the time of the year, they stand out and indi­cate that at least one tree in that area is dead, and where there is one, there are prob­a­bly more. Also, all of the bark that fell from the tree to cre­ate that “bone” has to be some­where and that some­where is most like­ly right around the base of the tree. Even though most of the bark may be old and weath­ered, some that is under the tree, or on the more pro­tect­ed side of the tree, or under the bark that is on the sur­face, or pro­tect­ed by veg­e­ta­tion, might still be very well suit­ed for col­lec­tion and carv­ing. In any case, “bones” and areas around them are always worth inves­ti­gat­ing, as are trees on which some “bones” are show­ing while oth­er parts of the tree looks fine.

08-Bones

Sev­er­al “Bones” trees in the dis­tance (Click all pho­tos for a larg­er image; close the image to returm)

Stand­ing Dead Trees

Although “bones” are dead trees, not all dead trees have “bones” – and if you can find dead trees that are still cov­ered with bark, you might just have dis­cov­ered the jack­pot for a bark col­lec­tor. Stand­ing dead trees which are still cov­ered with bark are very dif­fi­cult to find in the win­ter because they can­not be dis­tin­guished from live trees that have lost their leaves. How­ev­er, while not as easy to spot as the “bones”, in the sum­mer and ear­ly fall, if you look care­ful­ly, dead trees con­trast enough with their live neigh­bors to be noticed. They are even more notice­able if they stand alone in the mid­dle or edge of a field or are in a row of trees along a ditch line, and not mixed with a lot of oth­er trees in a thick­ly wood­ed area. Dead trees, whether stand­ing or fall­en, are always worth inves­ti­gat­ing, as are trees which have some live areas but appear to be par­tial­ly dead.

Fall­en and Bro­ken Trees

Bro­ken-trees

Fall­en and bro­ken trees are always a find that deserves inves­ti­ga­tion because, if not already dead, they will soon be, and are pos­si­bly a source of good bark. My best source of bark this past sum­mer was from a large dou­ble trunk tree that had fall­en over on a prop­er­ty where I had col­lect­ed a lot of bark and have main­tained a friend­ship, includ­ing reg­u­lar vis­its with the landown­er.

Get­ting Bet­ter

Bro­ken Tree

Reward!

Under­brush and oth­er foliage can make it very dif­fi­cult to see fall­en trees. How­ev­er, I have found that very often the tops of large dead trees break off leav­ing a 10 — 25 feet of trunk still stand­ing. Look for these as they are great finds — not only because of the bark on them but because the part that broke off is also there, hid­ing in the under­brush.

Fall­en Tree

Fall­en Tree Bark

I noticed this one because a large trunk of the tree had fall­en out­ward, away from the tim­bers and land­ed out in an open, plowed field. Upon inves­ti­ga­tion, I found that two oth­er large trunks of the tree had fall­en into the tim­bers. I had to wait over 2 years for the bark on these trunks to start falling off and be loose enough to remove but this was my boon for 2011, both because of the large amount of bark avail­able and because the loca­tion had good access. I missed out on the sec­tion that fell into the field because it was chain­sawed up into large 4″ to 6″ thick disks which were then thrown over the fence along the edge of the field.

New Fall­en Tree 01

New Fall­en Tree 02

Very large trees

While not all very large trees have thick, wide bark and while some trees that are not very large in diam­e­ter do have thick bark, gen­er­al­ly very large trees are the ones most like­ly to have bark that is thick enough for carv­ing. When­ev­er I am scan­ning a wood­ed area for bark pos­si­bil­i­ties, I am look­ing for some real­ly large trees – those that real­ly stand out from the rest – mon­archs of the area that announce that they have been there 100 years or more. Areas with these real­ly giant trees are the best areas to look if you want to find some real­ly thick bark. Even if I do not see any “bones” or dead trees from a dis­tance, if an area has a num­ber of cot­ton­woods that stand out as larg­er that most, it is def­i­nite­ly an area that I want to inves­ti­gate. The worst that can hap­pen is that I could get to walk amongst some real­ly majes­tic old trees and not find any dead or fall­en ones and that is not too bad at all.

Wood Piles and Drift Piles

These may be drift piles along a riv­er bank or on riv­er island, or piles of trees dozed up by a farmer to clear an area, etc. In one area where I col­lect the landown­er had allowed a fire­wood col­lec­tor to cut up dead trees from his prop­er­ty for years. Upon inves­ti­ga­tion I found that at almost every loca­tion where a fall­en tree had been cut up for fire­wood I found a large pile of bark, often mixed with oth­er tree trim­mings that had been removed from the tree. Some­times pieces of the bark had chain­sawn, but much of the time it appeared that the bark had been removed and piled up before the tree was cut up for the fire­wood.

Although not a source for a large amount of bark, I have often found very nice pieces of bark in drift piles along the Yel­low­stone Riv­er.

There are also areas where I col­lect bark in which the landown­ers had dozed numer­ous large trees into a row, adja­cent to a road or ditch and I have been able to col­lect a lot of nice bark by search­ing through such rub­ble.

Drift piles along rivers or on islands are poten­tial col­lec­tion spots that should not be passed up. Care­ful­ly look­ing in such piles can often result in some finds of nice pieces of bark for carv­ing. Since one is not like­ly to find a large amount of good bark in a sin­gle pile, I do not expect these to be very help­ful to sup­ply­ing the amount of bark that I need for my cus­tomers but I do enjoy look­ing through them for select pieces of bark and oth­er good carv­ing woods. Often they con­tain nice pieces of juniper (my “Jump­ing Juniper” carv­ing is an exam­ple) and oth­er good pieces of drift­wood. Many of these “islands” are acces­si­ble by foot (the ones in the pho­to are) dur­ing low flow peri­ods and in the win­ter when the small­er side chan­nels are frozen or dry. A vaca­tion­er pass­ing through this area or a sim­i­lar area could expect to have both fun and suc­cess if they did some hiking/hunting on such islands. There are lots of these in the Yel­low­stone riv­er from Liv­ingston, MT to 200+ miles east of there. Pub­lic lands, parks, wildlife man­age­ment areas, fish­ing access areas and road cross­ings all offer oppor­tu­ni­ties to access such islands.

Riv­er Piles 01

Riv­er Piles 02

The Impor­tance on On-foot Search­es

I want to stress the impor­tance of doing a very thor­ough, on-foot search of any areas that look to have bark poten­tial after per­mis­sion, if need­ed, has been obtained to go into an area.

My expe­ri­ence has shown that while scout­ing from a car or boat might iden­ti­fy some good bark sources (as indi­cat­ed by what was found on the “bones” in one of the pho­tos), more often than not, the best bark finds are made when search­ing areas not vis­i­ble from a road or riv­er, but only on foot. A good exam­ple of this is a dis­cov­ery I made when search­ing deep­er into the woods behind the trees shown in the “bones” pho­to.

Jack­pot 01

Jack­pot 02

I actu­al­ly missed see­ing this on my way into the woods because where I entered the wood are fair­ly thick and I went in a ways above the top end of the fall­en tree; how­ev­er, as I came out on a dif­fer­ent route I walked right into a jack­pot. “jackpot2”. It had more bark on this side then and boy did I get excit­ed. This tree is one of those giants that is a very spe­cial bark find. It is so large in diam­e­ter that I could not reach the bark near the top of the trunk from the ground. This will require climb­ing up the root end to get on top of the fall­en tree.

Jack­pot 03

A sec­tion far­ther up the tree which had excep­tion­al­ly nice bark.

On large cot­ton­wood trees you often find the best bark 8–10 feet or high­er up the tree. The best bark on this tree was a good 20 feet above the ground when the tree was stand­ing. As you can imag­ine from this pho­to, it takes a lot of work to get bark from such loca­tions off the tree and even to an area where you can get a cart to load the bark on for haul­ing out of the woods.

The bark dis­cov­er­ies shown in the pho­tos BrokenTree, Get­ting Bet­ter, and Reward above also would nev­er had been made if I did not hike back to check areas of the woods that are not vis­i­ble from the near­est roads.

Com­ing in Part 3: Tools Used For Bark Col­lect­ing and Clean­ing

Alex Bis­so with a Cot­ton­wood Monarch.

Alex Bis­so is a wood­carv­er, and col­lec­tor and sell­er of cot­ton­wood bark and oth­er found wood. To view some of Alex’s carv­ings and cot­ton­wood bark sup­ply at Be So Good Wood, click HERE.